The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity · HackerPapers discussions

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity — HN submission

Thu, 29 Oct 2026 21:55:50 GMT

The Illusion of Thinking: Models Don't Actually Reason

14 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity — mentioned by jeanmichelselli

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:51:34 GMT

AI models and in particular LLMs are not capable of logic reasoning. See for example this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06941 Ergo, they can't prove any theorem whatsoever. How do people at OpenAI expect that we believe in claims like that? This is yet another before-the-IPO stunt in my opinion.. Personally, I won't believe any of these claims until the community of mathematicians says otherwise.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity — mentioned by montebicyclelo

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:46:23 GMT

The article is heavily leaning on the paper "The Illusion of Thinking" [1]. It could be boiled down to: in 2025 this paper showed that "thought traces" in the models of the time could sometimes be inaccurate or misleading. Today they still might be, although OpenAI says actually they are accurate for their modern models, (based on internal research, rather than published research). [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06941

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The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity — mentioned by lambdaone

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:22:38 GMT

Structured thinking and deliberation are indeed important, but you can also make LLMs do structured "thinking" if you work hard enough, and generate quite plausible reasoned arguments with valid real-world results, and you can get them to write down their working as they go. But as research has shown, it's not "true" thinking, just pattern matching at a higher level, and eventually runs out of steam.[0] But you only have to drill down a couple more layers and you are back in the void again; do you have any proof that your own thinking, no matter how structured and accurate, is anything other…

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The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity — mentioned by curious_cat_163

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 18:16:15 GMT

Nathan Lambert provides a counterpoint to the recent "The Illusion of Thinking" paper by Apple [1]: "On one of these toy problems, the Tower of Hanoi, the models structurally cannot output enough tokens to solve the problem — the authors still took this as a claim that “these models cannot reason” or “they cannot generalize.” This is a small scientific error." "it appears that a majority of critiques of AI reasoning are based in a fear of no longer being special rather than a fact-based analysis of behaviors." [1]: https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/2506.06941

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.